Thread by @ErikLoomis

This Day in Labor History: May 4, 1886. The Haymarket Bombing takes place, killing 7 police officers and leading to massive repression and the death of anarchists who did not do it. Let's strip away the lefty nostalgia for this event and talk about the real deal.

The mid-1880s saw the native-born working class struggling to understand the new labor system of the Gilded Age. The promises of mutually respectful employer-employee relations at the center of early Republican free labor ideology were now shown to be a farce.

Given this and the fact workers living increasing desperate lives in dirty and dangerous factories and condemned to poverty, the American working-class sought to even the playing field between employer and employee.

The Knights of Labor promised the eight-hour day; in a period when labor looked for a single panacea to solve all problems rather than a deep class analysis of labor-employer relations, the working-class jumped to the idea.

The Knights, led by Terence Powderly, grew rapidly in the mid-1880s, even though Powderly didn’t really envision the organization as a radical challenge to capitalism.

Still, “Eight Hours for Work, Eight Hours for Sleep, Eight Hours for What You Will” became the slogan for a million or more Americans.

But Powderly’s control over the organization was tenuous and with the Knights defined as open to all workers, it meant that anarchists and other radicals could easily join and then try to convert workers to their cause.

The center of 8-hour organizing was in Chicago, where small numbers of radicals began organizing workers to demand the 8-hour day and threaten a general strike if denied. In the days around May 1, 1886, between 300,000 and 500,000 workers walked off their job around the nation.

Probably 80,000 of those workers were in Chicago. The police responded with sadly predictable violence. On May 3, police murdered 6 strikers at the McCormick Harvesting Machine plant.

The McCormick workers had been battling with their employer for a year, who had hired Pinkertons to beat them. They combined their already existing struggle with the 8-hour day to become some of the most respected working-class militants in the city.

Responding to the murders, anarchists called a march to protest police violence the next day at Haymarket Square, which maybe 1,500 people attended. It was not a particularly large rally for the moment.

The truth was that these anarchists did not represent many of the workers in Chicago. A few were working within the 8-hour day movement. But the anarchist movement was mostly made up of German immigrants, often fleeing political violence at home.

They came to the U.S. and their view of the American working class is that they were dupes. So they organized in Chicago but mostly didn’t even bother trying to communicate with American workers. Most of their writings remained in German, for example.

Moreover, many came under the influence of man named Johann Most, who propagated what became known as “the propaganda of the deed.”

This meant that violence–even deaths–that hurt innocents was politically justifiable because it would spur greater revolutionary activity and lead to the overthrow of the corrupt capitalist state.

To say this was a morally dubious position is an understatement. But this was the ideology of many Chicago anarchists, who openly talked of violence in their speeches and publications.

Among the speakers was Albert Parsons. Born in Alabama, Parsons grew up in frontier Texas in the 1850s.

Although he volunteered for the Confederacy as a young man, he became a southern white Republican in the years after the war. Parsons repudiated his Confederate past and supported not only the principles of Reconstruction but voting rights for African-Americans.

He then married an African-American woman named Lucy Parsons, had a long and amazing career of her own. First, she completely denied she was black and in fact showed zero interest in the concerns of black workers in Chicago.

She also sent her own son to a mental asylum when he wanted to join the military in the Spanish-American War; he died there a couple decades later and there's no evidence she ever visited him.

However, Lucy Parson was also a major radical for decades, was at the founding of the IWW, helped organize the defense of the Scottsboro Boys, influenced a young Studs Terkel, etc.

Anyway, Albert and Lucy Parsons were forced out of Texas due to intolerance to both their political beliefs and their interracial marriage. They moved to Chicago where they both wrapped themselves in the political maelstrom of the time.

Parsons became a socialist newspaper editor, attended the first convention of the National Labor Union in 1876, and in 1880, withdrew from electoral politics to immerse himself in anarchism. In 1884 began an anarchist newspaper in support of the 8-hour day.

Albert Parsons gave an hour-long speech and by the time he finished, only around 500 people remained. As Samuel Fielden closed the rally with one last speech, the police marched into the square to end it by force.

When the police moved in on the marchers, someone threw a bomb. The police responded by firing into the marchers, killing a disputed number (probably between 4 and 8) before cease-firing, fearful they would shoot each other in the darkness and confusion.

Maybe 50 people on both sides were wounded.

The media reacted with anti-radical hysteria.

The Chicago Tribune called to bar any “foreign savages who might come to American with their dynamite bombs and anarchistic purposes.” Unsure who actually threw the bomb but assuming it was a conspiracy, authorities tried eight of Chicago’s leading anarchists for the murders.

That included Albert Parsons and August Spies, both of whom definitely did not throw the bomb. Parsons was actually in a nearby bar drinking a beer after his speech. Louis Lingg openly admitted making bombs but said he would have admitted it had he thrown it.

Parsons argued that someone working for the corporations threw the bomb to provide an excuse for police violence and repression.

The most likely candidate was an anarchist named Rudolph Schnaubelt, who fled the nation immediately after the killings and perhaps lived the rest of his life in Argentina. Yet no one knew for sure.

Despite the lack of evidence, seven defendants received the death penalty and another fifteen years in prison for conspiracy to commit murder.

Louis Lingg committed suicide the day before his execution, while Parsons, Spies, Adolph Fischer, and George Engel were hanged on November 11, 1887.

The other three were pardoned a few years later by Illinois governor John Altgeld, one of the few pro-worker politicians of the Gilded Age.

The aftermath of Haymarket, plus the police repression and employer intransigence, completely destroyed the Knights of Labor and the 8-hour movement.

Powderly repudiated the violence but was also totally unprepared for every part of the situation, from the size of the Knights to the official repression of labor radicalism. His indifference to the anarchists also alienated a lot of Knights members.

The Knights crumbled soon after and though workers still dreamed of the 8-hour day, it would take another half-century and countless dead workers to see it become a reality.

The question to me at this point is why on Earth was this event the inspiration for the May 1 workers' holiday. Yes, the anarchists at Haymarket were railroaded to death. That's terrible. But they were not exactly good people. Killing police was exactly what they argued for.

The Haymarket anarchists were hijacking a legitimate workers' movement for their own purposes and were indifferent for how their actions would undermine that. To them, it was all worth the revolutionary outcome. But that's terrible for real workers.

It's the same with Homestead. Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman weren't heroes for trying (and failing) to kill Henry Clay Frick. They were villains, as they gave the whole country the needed excuse to crush the legitimate workers' movement.

I am not criticizing these people for violence. I am criticizing them for hijacking workers' movements to their own end. No one has the right to commit violence on their own volition in the name of workers without asking their permission.

I fully admit that I basically despise anarchism as an ideology. I believe it is the best friend capitalism could ever want. I think it's romantic claptrap that prioritizes toxic individualism and meaningless violence over real organizing toward a socialist future.

But even outside of that, there are so many far more legitimate events of worker repression that should form the basis for international workers' solidarity, both in the U.S. and across the globe. Whatever, nothing can be done about it now. It is what it is.

Anyway, there are a billion books that discuss Haymarket, the 8-hour day strikes, etc. One is mine, as this makes up the core of Chapter 3 of the Ten Strikes.

amazon.com/History-Americ…

Back tomorrow to build on this and talk about another incident in the 8-hour day strikes, the murder of workers by police in Milwaukee.